Gentleman
by J Plash
Summary: Edward may be a vampire, but he's still a man. Crack fic of the deliciously spine-tingling kind – Edward's more dubious thoughts as he watches Bella sleep one night shortly before the beginning of New Moon. Warning: extreme tormented-Edward hotness :D


A/N: This is a (vaguely) crack fic. It is meant to be. It exists solely to torment our beloved Edward (in the most spine-tingling way possible ;-D). So, please, no flames about Edward being out of character. I know. He's as close as I could manage in the context, but small sacrifices have to be made if we want to write fun like this ;-D This fic was just too much fun not to write it :P Hope you enjoy :D Hehehe.

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**Gentleman**

Edward tried terribly hard not to fantasize 'that' way about Bella. Really, he did. He shouldn't, he scolded himself, he mustn't, she'd be horrified if she knew, and he tried his very formidable best not to think about the way her soft, slim legs curled slightly when she lay against him in her bed at night, pressing the softness of her thighs against his, the barely perceptible pressure of her knees pushing into his muscles and how blissful it would be to slide his hand up from a perfectly innocent spot on her knee up over the soft, feminine curve of her thigh...bad Edward!

He glared at himself internally, catching himself thinking decidedly inappropriate thoughts for the third time tonight. You would hardly know he had been raised a gentleman, he scolded himself in frustration. He was turning into more of a ruffian every day. Bella would be disgusted. Thinking about her that way while she lay asleep in his arms...it was utterly reprehensible. The fact that she was so unreasonably tempting was no excuse – it was hardly her fault, after all. She couldn't help it if her hair was so soft it just asked to be let down and tangled in his fingers, or if the clear, translucent glow of her skin in the moonlight just begged his hands to run down her jaw, down the graceful line of her long neck, over her perfect, straight collarbone, caressing the fragile, luscious curves of her delicate, smallish, perfect breasts...No! Bad. He growled at himself under his breath, low in his chest, too quietly to wake her, too quietly to disturb her dreams. Every now and then she would mumble his name as he entered into those dreams, and that didn't help his efforts at controlling his thoughts one bit...if only a good splash of cold water could work on vampires the way he had heard it did on humans. These things didn't work nearly as well when one lacked the benefits of warm blood. No, a glass of cold water tipped on his head would not help with stray thoughts. A glass of cold water tipped on his head would only make him...wet.

And if he was wet, and if he was lying here with Bella in his arms, then soon enough she would be too, and he was sure that that could not help at all...because if Bella were wet, then the thin white cotton singlet she insisted on wearing to bed would cling to her body, cling to each of her beautiful, feminine, womanly curves, and her heavenly scent would be all the more powerful with her skin damp from being pressed against him, and if he could see all of those graceful, delectable curves more clearly still, then it could only remind him how it would surely feel to hold her beneath him, the length of her perfect, sensual body pressed soft and warm and tingling against his, and how her breath always stopped and her heart sped up and faltered delightfully when he kissed her, and how tiny, delicious, entrancing sounds of pleasure escaped her when he held her closer and how maybe, just maybe, she would react even more gloriously if he went one step further and ran his hands down to touch every inch of her soft, smooth skin, and how surely, he barely dared imagine how mesmerising she would be as she moved with his touch, reacting to him, responding to him, feeling for him, pleasured by him...

No longer even bothering to scold himself, he unwound his arms furiously from the object of his affections, careful not to wake her, and seated himself, precisely and deliberately, on the edge of her rocking chair, safely across the room. He was becoming as bad as those despicable boys from Forks High, he could swear it. Every day, he noted with horror, he resembled more and more those mongrel schoolboys whose minds he so often found filled with unforgivable thoughts of his beautiful angel. And yet here was he, he who had sworn to protect her from such rogues, who had wanted to stand in their way before he'd even realised he was in love, sitting in her room having disturbingly similar thoughts himself. He clenched his jaw in distress. Surely this was different. He wasn't like those boys. This wasn't like that. He wasn't some child in the schoolyard. She was...his. All his. He glowed at the thought, feeling his whole body fill with warmth. His. Yes. That must make it different. After all, Bella would be horrified by the thought of those boys—he shuddered and repressed the irrational urge to kill them, all of them, at once—kissing her, and she certainly didn't object to him kissing her. That was one very clear difference, solid and quantifiable. And that meant that he wasn't like those boys, foul and uncouth, disgracing and defiling his Bella with their impertinent, presumptuous, grinding, groping, slobbering, overactive imaginations. For several seconds Edward sat very still and reminded himself that leaving Bella for a few minutes to slaughter the male seniors of Forks High would not be acceptable to his family or to Bella, though he couldn't bring himself to think that he would ever really feel remorse for ridding the world of their filthy, grasping minds...he took a deep breath and, clearing away all thoughts of their muck, shifted his gaze from its set on his knees to its favourite set on Bella's angelic face.

All notions of killing had purged themselves from his mind before he'd had a chance to so much as exhale. Bella. The sweetness and warmth that filled him when he gazed upon her smiling, sleeping face was like a magic potion, an elixir of life that gave him joy and purpose like he'd never thought possible. She shifted a little in her sleep, sending waves of her sweet, luxurious scent across the room and letting the thick beam of moonlight through the window fall across her body, all the way from her navel, just visible beneath the hem of her top, scrunched up in her sleeping movement, to the tip of her forehead, hair drawn back from her face and tied up for the night. He made such efforts to keep her safely warm and covered up, and as soon as he left the bed she had to roll half way out of her covers and look even more shockingly, indecently tempting. He crossed silently back to her side and pulled her quilt up to tuck around her neck. He may not feel the cold, but he saw her shiver sometimes, so he knew that she must get cold here in Forks. She had not grown up in cold weather. It was important to keep her warm. He congratulated himself on behaving for a whole five minutes and returned carefully to the armchair, perching once more on the edge. And then, just as he sat down again, there it was. His favourite sound in the world.

"Edward..."

Any time, any place, nothing could make him feel quite so blessed as Bella speaking his name. Nothing except, possibly, those glorious, unmatchable times when Bella said she loved him. He sighed happily, perfectly content. No, he didn't have to worry about being like those barbarian schoolboys. She loved him. And he loved her. And that made all the difference.

And if that was true, then how terribly, horribly, despicably wrong could his inappropriate, ungentlemanly, really totally unacceptable thoughts be? Especially when it would feel so very, very good to slide her jeans down her soft, smooth thighs, slip off her panties, toss his own clothes away and hold her close, body soft and warm and fragile against his as he pressed slowly, sweetly, gently, deliciously, blissfully inside her...he groaned in frustration, trying very, very hard to find a distractingly uncomfortable spot on his very favourite armchair—the only one in the world with a clear view of the very most beautiful girl in the world. He was definitely, he reflected with a sigh of despair, fighting a horribly, hopelessly losing battle.


End file.
